


Bring Me a Dream

by monimala



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gap Filler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:24:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monimala/pseuds/monimala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set shortly after episode 1.3 and slipping under/between canon episodes that follow. Abbie’s not getting much sleep. She wants to ask Crane if he’s having dreams, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time she has the dream— _the_ dream—she thinks that maybe they didn’t get the Sandman after all, that he’s still messing with her subconscious, trying to pull her onto his turf.

She can’t look at Crane for an hour that morning, and he brings her a Red Bull, apologizing for some imagined slight in that painfully polite but also kind of sly way of his. “It’s not your fault,” she wants to tell him, but she can’t. She doesn’t. Because the words won’t move past the knot in her throat and the tips of her ears are hot with embarrassment. And because it _is_ his fault. At least a little. For being tall and handsome and funny and decent…but mostly handsome.

The second time she has the dream, she wakes up drenched in sweat and gasping for air, still feeling his palms skimming down her thighs, still hearing him whispering, “leftenant” in her ear like it’s George Washington’s secret code for “You’re beautiful.”

She can’t go back to sleep after. She gets up, splashes water on her face, drinks half a bottle of water, and still can’t cool down. Would he really call her “leftenant” in bed? The question keeps running through her mind well into the next day, and when he drops her rank into some casual conversation about 21st century idiosyncrasies she can’t help but shiver and tell him, “Abbie. Call me Abbie.”

“Is something wrong?” He frowns, his musings about the wastefulness of paper products cut short. “Did I offend you somehow?”

_No_. _Yes_. _Sorry, it’s just that I now have a Pavlovian response to that word and it turns me on whenever you say it_. Nothing she can think of to say in response is adequate, so she just tightens her hands on the steering wheel and shakes her head.

He stares at her for the longest minute in the world. Four days go by in a blink. Except this time she’s conscious. _Too_ conscious. Her collar and tie are too tight, her jacket constricting. The man has seen her in her plain, black, utilitarian bra, for God’s sake. This should not be a thing.

But it is. It’s a thing that follows her all day, as they work their latest case and deal with the latest crazy.

And that night, she dreams of him again. Of him and of _them_ , a naked, slick tangle of limbs, and her laughing as he notes, with something that sounds like relief, that at least sex hasn’t changed in 250 years. No, it hasn’t. And it’s hot and it’s good, and it makes her feel strong and alive and… _awake_. To everything.

She wants to ask Crane if he’s having dreams, too. She _should_ ask. It’s what a good cop does: investigate. After all, it’s entirely possible that the fantasies are part of their seven years of tribulation. Except she can’t even handle seven nights of it, so how can she handle years? And how does she talk to a man who blushes at a mannequin wearing underwear in a store window about intimate, inappropriate dreams? How does she ask a man things like that when he still considers himself married and gets prophetic messages from his dead wife whenever _he’s_ asleep?

It’s crazy. She’s crazy. Stammering. Having trouble looking him in the eye. Feeling beard burn where there isn’t any. Abbie Mills is not some dumb little girl with a crush on a boy at school. She needs to get a hold of herself.

“Are you truly alright, Lieutenant Mills?” Again, he pronounces it “leftenant.” Again she shudders and grips the wheel, willing the red light they’re stopped at to shift to green so she can gun the engine and speed away from the concern in his voice.    

But they just happen to be at the longest red light in Sleepy Hollow. So they sit there for interminable minutes, while Crane watches her. The professor studying her every movement, and her every lack of movement, too.

“Is it your dreams?” he asks, suddenly. “Are they disturbing your sleep?”

“Wh-what dreams?” She chokes on air, whips around to meet his gaze. No one in this century has eyes that earnest, or that exact shade of blue. “What do you mean ‘dreams’?”

He delicately clears his throat and then folds his hands one over the other. Only a few seconds go by. But they’re enough of a stretch to tell her that he’s about to lie to her. “Why…the visions, of course,” he says, careful propriety dripping from every syllable. Completely bullshit impropriety. “Of what’s to come.”

Visions. Of what’s to come. Oh. Oh, _hell_.

“No.” The light changes and Abbie’s foot slams on the pedal like she’s on the speedway at the Grand Prix. “No, nothing in these dreams is going to happen to us,” she assures, her voice thick. “It’s not important. Forget it. I’m fine. This is all going to be fine.”

She concentrates on the road, looking straight ahead through the windshield, and ignores his efforts to lock eyes with her in the rearview mirror. She ignores the itch along her spine and the lump in her throat. And the _want_.

She was wrong about asking him. About needing to know. Because realizing Crane’s sharing the dream— _the_ dream—isn’t a relief or a comfort at all.

And knowing he thinks she’s beautiful is just another curse.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ichabod's been up all night... _and_ all day. Will he and Abbie ever awaken to their true desires?

He cannot drive her from his mind. No matter how he tries. His eyes close, his body relaxes, and he longs for the mist and Katrina—but she only comes to him in scraps and snatches, when he least expects her, and always bearing warning. It his constant companion in daylight, Lieutenant Mills, who is also his constant companion in the darkness.

It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before. Like nowhere he’s ever been. Not death, not purgatory, not heaven nor hell. She slips between the soft sheets of his unfamiliar bed, her skin softer still. She calls him “Crane” in that stern voice, the one she uses when she’s desperately trying to keep her amusement in check but the tug of a smile at the corner of her lips betrays her. “Crane, I want you,” she tells him. “I want you _in_ me. If you can take orders from Washington, you can take orders from me.”

And he does. Oh, how he does.

Each night, as he fights and falls to slumber, he concedes to her every demand. Until all he wants is more of them. More orders, more touches, more kisses. More of her thighs gripping his hips and her blunt fingernails marking his back.

Each morning, he awakens with sticky sheets, as if he’s again a boy of 12 and not a man of more than 200. And he goes to the police station pretending all he cares about are horsemen and prophecy and years of tribulation. Pretending that he is an honorable man, a married man, and not the worst sort of cad.

“This is all going to be fine,” she’d promised when he dared to question if she, too, had such visions. But he’s not fine. This is not, by any definition, _fine_.          

They are growing closer, he and Abbie. There is trust between them. Camaraderie. Affection. But there is also this deepening chasm of unholy need, of forbidden desire. Be it blessing or curse, it is distancing them. He knows this; he feels the encroaching silence and the gathering mistrust. As the Witnesses, they cannot afford to be driven apart. Not at a time so critical, so precarious.

It is at yet another infernal red light that he forces himself to give voice to his conflict. Her small but capable hands rest on the wheel…mirroring the way they so often in his dreams rest on his chest. He almost cannot speak, so powerful is the memory of couplings never truly shared. “Lieutenant, I…I should like to ask you something…”

“Crane?” She glances sideways at him, the dark pools of her eyes entirely too insightful. “You still not sleeping?”

“I-is it that obvious?” The laugh stutters out of him. “It appears the Sandman is not quite done with us after all.”

“Either that, or you’ve got a guilty conscience.” It’s meant to be teasing, but the words are entirely too on point, and he flinches.

_Yes_ , _Lieutenant, I am guilty of a great many things. Chief among them, adultery. In my mind and in my heart._ “And what of you, Abbie. How is your conscience?”

Her gaze shifts back to the vehicle’s windows. She instantly withdraws. “I’m sleeping like a baby,” she lies. Of _course_ she lies. “Maybe we need to introduce you to yet another miraculous 21 st century invention: Ambien.”

“Ambi-what? The only things more ridiculous than the inventions in this time are what you choose to _call_ them.” His mouth moves, his outrage sounds authentic, but he is not invested in the obvious diversion. No. Instead, he is obsessed by the flutter of her dark lashes against her cheek. By the way she struggles to marshal her breathing. She is not unaffected, his beautiful, brave lieutenant. Not _unmoved_.

But she denies it. Denies _him_. Just as he, too, succumbs and pretends nothing is out of sorts. They travel to another crime scene, set eyes upon another horror show, and shut out everything but duty.

This is not how they are in their dreams—in that terrible, wonderful place where they are completely open to each other, torn wide for one another’s mouths and hands. There, in the space between cotton and silk, between whisper and scream, he instinctively knows what she wants and she fundamentally understands what he craves. They are…honest. Or at least as honest as their sin allows.

_Crane, I want you._ I _want_ you.

It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before. Like nowhere he’s ever been. Not death, not purgatory, not heaven nor hell. Not even the sacred confines of marriage.  

And it is only in a quiet moment, in between the slam of car doors and muttered curses and hopes temporarily quashed, that he understands one basic truth: He cannot drive her from his mind, because even there she holds the wheel.

He has no license, she might say.

“Give me lessons,” he might beg of her.

If only he could find the words.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There is one great sin that the eater did not devour._ Set after episode 1.6.

He is _not_ cleansed. He is _not_ sanctified. There is one great sin that the eater did not devour. And yet he clings to it, takes comfort in it, brushing his chin along the top of her head and breathing in the scent of being _alive_. Are his adulterous thoughts, his betrayals between sleep and awake, not so terrible as murder or treason? Or is this the punishment, the reminder, that he must carry with him as he moves forward in pursuit of the truth?

Crane cannot regret it. He cannot regret carrying _her_ , his brave and bold lieutenant, always ready to stand beside him at the gates of Hell. They are, after all, travelers on the same journey. Both literal and metaphorical.

“You okay?” she asks again, as he buckles himself into the passenger seat of her motorcar—the contraption is one of the few things he is now at ease with.

It seems to be their favorite question to ask one another: “Are you okay? Are you all right? Is something wrong?” So constantly aware are they of shifts in mood and melancholy. Just like the shift of their bodies in the darkness of dreams _. Her breath, her whisper, her thighs clasping his._ Words catch in his throat and strangle, and he cannot look at her for the shame, for the desire.

“I met her, you know. Katrina.” Abbie fills in the silence. Straight to the point, practical and head-on. “She told me how to save you.”

And yet he does not feel saved. Thankful, yes. Lightened of a burden, certainly. But, oh, he is _not_ out of the woods. What was it like, he wonders. Did they take one another’s measure? Did they each stake a claim? His bride and his partner, both vital and essential and _present_.

“…and then we braided each other’s hair.”

“ _What_?” The incongruous image gives him a start, and he realizes he’s gathered enough wool for a fine knitted jumper. They’ve come miles since returning Miss Jenny to her hospital.

A smile touches her lips, weary but still bright, and she pulls the car round in front of Corbin’s cabin. “You’ve had a long day, Crane.”

And his night will be even longer. They both know that, even though they have not spoken of it in more than the abstract. As if they do not give voice to their deepest secrets, the feelings are somehow untrue. She is so determined, his Lieutenant Mills, to keep him close and yet keep him at a distance. And he, too, maintains the proper separation. More than a waltz’s length apart. Courtly bows, jovial banter and then penance at Katrina’s grave.

Until this day. Until his sins were laid bare for all to see. Until death looked him in the face and he looked back, accepting of his fate, but Abbie refused to let him go.

His hand is on the latch. Half in, half out, of the vehicle. “Would you like to come in?”

"I don't think that's a good—" The sensible response dies on her tongue. She gazes at him for a heavy moment, as if she's making record of each and every one of his demons. And whatever she sees cements her decision: "Okay. You probably shouldn't be alone with all those memories right now."

As if the memories don’t constantly clog his throat like grave dirt, whether he is alone or in a room full of people. But she knows that. She knows it all. Because she, too, is so very solitary. Save when they are side by side.

She keeps pace with him all the way to the cabin door and only hesitates at the threshold. As if, once crossed, the step cannot be untaken.

He understands. And he reaches for her delicate but capable fingers and pulls her with him.

This sin is theirs, and only theirs, to consume.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Something else has got a hold of Crane._ Set before, during and after 1.8, "Necromancer."

She doesn’t. They don’t. Not really. It’s… _chaste_. Almost. His hands threading through her hair. Her cheek pressed against his chest. Another hug. Longer than before. Quieter. Louder, too. Because his heart echoes all the way through her. The closest his lips get to hers is when they brush along her cheek as he whispers, “Thank you, Lieutenant.” _Thank you, leftenant._ “You are a true partner. A true friend.”

He doesn’t ask her to bed. She doesn’t lead him there. There is too much to do, too much they can’t forget— _someone_ they can’t forget—so they just sink to the couch, a tangle of tired limbs and semi-hysterical laughs. And she stays with him until he falls asleep. Restless. Moving. His head not settling against her lap until she strokes back his mess of long hair and murmurs that he’ll be okay.

It’s like curling up with a really tall puppy. That’s what she tells herself later when she’s driving home alone. Crane is a puppy, all big hands and big feet and big blocks of emotion. He doesn’t know the house rules yet. He doesn’t know that ownership goes both ways—that she belongs to him now just as much as he belongs to her.

It’s only when they trap their old friend Headless that she realizes something else’s got a hold of Crane, too. He’s tied up in crazy knots, tighter than the Horseman’s chains. And the methodical, rational scholar suddenly turns into a wild card. Into a man she doesn’t know.

No. That’s a lie.

Abbie is more than familiar with the irrational, bad tempered jerk who paces the cell and yells at her. That’s the man in bed with her in her fantasies. An Ichabod Crane unfettered enough to cheat on his not-quite-dead wife, reckless enough to take her against the wall, on the floor and in the backseat of her squad car. She knows him so well…and she knows he doesn’t belong in the real world.

“We need to stay on point,” she reminds Crane. And herself, too. They have more important things to worry about than his convoluted romantic history with Katrina and his best buddy or her mental recap of their erotic dream world. They have a bona fide epic shitstorm to take care of.

But the warnings don’t matter in the end. All her efforts to keep a leash on Crane are for nothing. Even with her sister and Irving’s help, they take one step forward, two steps back. They lose the Horseman. They lose Brooks. And she loses what she thought was _their thing_ when Crane says they need Katrina more than ever.

No. No, they do _not_ need her.

Abbie’s got this. _They’ve_ got this.

She doesn’t let him see it. She _hopes_ he doesn’t see it. The curl of her mouth. The way she suddenly focuses over his shoulder. A true friend wouldn’t be angry. A true partner wouldn’t be jealous. And his dear Lieutenant Abbie Mills wouldn’t think he’s a damn fool for holding on to a past that’s done nothing but wreck him.

So she takes him home. She walks him to the door. And when he gives her that look—that lost, lonely, “don’t leave me here by myself” look—she goes inside with him.

It’s chaste, she tells herself, when they end up back on the couch. Earnest. Sweet. The way he grips her hand. How he tells her he was full of fear and doubt and shame. “ _I_ made the Horseman, Abbie,” he confesses. “ _I_ led us to this moment.”

“No, you didn’t, Crane.” She tips her head against his shoulder, draws her knees up to her chest. “We got here together.”

And together they’ll stay.

He kisses her hair. Slips an arm around her. Leans into her. Takes her strength and gives her some of his. Hours go by like that. In silence. In solidarity. And even if she wants to make it more…

She doesn’t. They don’t. Not really.

But it’s real just the same.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spans 1.11, "The Vessel," through 1.13, "Bad Blood." Abbie is the only thing in Crane's life that's real.

She weeps after they exorcise the demon from Captain Irving’s child. Not great, wrenching, sobs. Not even visible tears. But he feels the grief within her as she holds her sister close. Hears, as always, what his dear Lieutenant Mills does not say. And when they bend together over General Washington’s diary, then, too, he is finely attuned to her every thought, her every emotion.

He did not know it would come to this. That it would come so very soon. They are the Witnesses. They are meant to toil for _years_. And, yet, Ichabod cannot help but feel that they have mere minutes left on this earth. There is a convergence of events. A pattern unfolding. An inevitability. 

So, is it not inevitable that he turns to her? That he draws her close, stealing comfort from her embrace, from her immovable faith in their success? He’s come to lean on her, to depend upon her, to find her his touchstone in an alien world. She is, increasingly, all that he can count on as _real_. 

“We’re gonna nail this, Crane,” she murmurs, settling her head beneath his chin, laying her ear against his heart. “Don’t you worry. I got this.”

Even if it is simply bravado, he is glad for it. For her.

And he is still a married man.

That makes it a mistake when he bends to press his lips to her hair. A breaking of vows to feel steadied by her warmth. And a betrayal to crave her body in waking as much as he does in slumber. And yet he does not stop. Not this time.

He has his own demons to exorcise, his own beasts to vanquish. His own _desires_ , by God, and can he not just have _one_ fulfilled?

Her dark eyes answer the question, and before her lips can even shape the accompanying words he gives in and tastes them. A chaste kiss. A courting kiss. A kiss that damns his immortal soul…no, that binds it.

“Crane…” Her palms push gently at his chest. Her voice is a husky, warning growl.

But he knows her desire mirrors his. Has known for weeks. “Abbie,” he admonishes, indulging in the softness of her skin, stroking her cheek, teasing her with the roughness of his beard against her jaw. “Abigail Mills. Must this only be a dream?”

“If you’re gonna regret this? Yeah. It’s better off a fantasy.”

Ever the practical one, his Abbie. All sharp brows and suspicion.

“I’ve got this,” he promises as he avails himself of her mouth. “I _have_ this.”

As he draws her all the closer.

As he fights the infernal modern fastenings of her clothing, wins and lowers his head to her breasts. As he takes hold of her hips and moves between them, hard as steel and ready to be forged anew in her fire.

“Crane, I need you,” she gasps, both firm and plaintive at once, as he joins with her. “I _need you_ ,” she repeats, over and over. “I need you to be with me. To stay with me.”

“I will,” he swears to her. “I will,” he vows, as his world goes perfectly still…

As he _wakes up_.

Alone.

This dream, so bitterly close to a reality, so impossible to sift from the truth, is the cruelest of them all. He curses, rails, tosses and turns. But he has nowhere to go. No recourse.

Ichabod pounds against the lid of the coffin, tasting grave dirt and fear and regret.

He sheds tears for Katrina, for Jeremy, and for his beautiful, impossible lieutenant. He’s realized it all too late: Leaving her in Purgatory has consigned his own soul to Hell. 


End file.
